


Nihil oder Alle Zeit der Welt

by TheAstronomyMod



Category: Blixa Bargeld (Musician), Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, F/M, German art films, Post-Apocalypse, Time Loop, Uli M Schüppel, experimental film, there is the theory of the moebius, wibbly wobbly timey wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-23 19:02:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14940053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomyMod/pseuds/TheAstronomyMod
Summary: In an obscure Institute run by an evil Professor (the personification of all that is unwholesome in society, who ingeniously controls the ruins of civilisation) a mysterious one-armed Visionary, chained like a madman in the cellar, holds the key to The Island which will save the world.Inspired by repeated watching of the Uli M Schueppel film (available online here). I found myself absolutely captivated by the mysterious and otherworldly atmosphere of the film to the point of obsession. (Not to mention,Blixa Bargeld chained half-naked in a cellar.) I found myself trying to write in and around the events of the film. A mistranslation (my German is not the greatest) of a character insisting that there is "no time" spiralled out into a science-fiction fantasy of what would happen in a world that was literally without time?You don't need to have seen the film to understand the story - readers have said it stands on its own.Content notes: false imprisonment, murder and passing reference to torture, (consensual) sex with someone in chains, childbirth and pregnancy, bathing.





	1. Kapitel Eins: The Madman

My father keeps a naked man chained in the cellar.

They say he’s a madman (but I don’t always know which one they mean: the maniac they call the Visionary, or my father, the Professor).

The Professor runs things now, in the Institute, which is my whole world, and apparently in the town beyond its gates. It’s always been like this, it’s all I’ve known. There’s no more Time, you see.

 

They brought him in at night – the madman – all bloodied and bruised, wrapped in a huge rubber mackintosh, one hand smashed and mangled, dangling from a jagged wrist at an unnatural angle. My father looked at the hand, and said >>That’ll have to come off.<< And they disappeared down into the Institute’s operating theatre. My father isn’t a surgeon. He’s not even a physician. He’s a physicist, by training. So the madman ended up with a large wood and metal mallet to fill the empty cuff of his coat.

It’s my job now, to take food to the madman in the basement. Cook used to do it, but she’s always too busy, fussing and complaining how there’s never the time any more, as if any of us could forget. So it became my job. I do my best to remember. But he’s very thin. That, I think, is my fault.

When I first went down there, I had to try, very hard, not to be afraid. But I could hear the weird knocking and banging sounds from outside in the corridor, and my curiosity proved stronger than my fear. I held my breath, and opened the door, just a crack, to peer inside.

He was crouched, like some great insect, up on the old operating table, bent over double, still wrapped in that dirty old rubber mac, though he seemed to wear nothing else beneath. His bare knees splayed to each side as he thwacked, noisily, very purposefully and with great concentration, at a large, leather-bound book, with the ugly hammer with which his mangled hand had been replaced. I tried to move as silently as possible, doing my best not to spill anything from the bowl, but the door creaked alarmingly, and he jerked his head suddenly towards the sound.

>>Freeeeeee!!!<< he cried, a great rending screech like a bird of prey. His eyes glittered under his mass of hair, as he lashed out with his hammer-fist, brandishing it like a weapon. And I saw, as he moved, the thick chain attached to a metal collar around his neck, which disappeared up into the darkness of the arched roof vault.

>>I’ve got your food<< I said, my voice shaking a little.

His eyes were like burning coals in the half-dark, the chain clanking as he moved to the end of its reach. It was just long enough to allow him to move about the table, but not much further. As he reached the side of the operating table nearest me, his voice creaked to life, as rusty as the hinge of the old door after that rending scream, addressing me formally, as if in reproach to my casual ‘du’. >>You may approach...<<

I didn’t know how far I would be able to walk before he could reach me, so I stepped forward slowly, apprehensively, carefully clutching the bowl of food in front of my chest, starting at those wild, glittering eyes peering through the thickets of his hair. But not carefully enough. As I neared the table, quick as a snake’s strike, I was blindsided by a sudden rap on my knuckles. Pain shot through my hand. With a shriek, I tried to withdraw, shaking my hand in shock, but he already had the bowl off me, and was scuttling back out of reach, retreating to the far side of the table. Like an animal, he hunched over it, and started scooping up the porridge with the fingers of his good hand and stuffing it into his mouth.

>>You didn’t have to do that<< I said sulkily, as I rubbed my sore knuckles, refusing to give him the deference of a formal ‘Sie’. >>I would have just given it to you.<<

He said nothing, intent upon his food, though his glittering gaze still seemed to watch me from the corner of his eye.

As he ate, I tried to walk around the room, wondering how I’d ever get the bowl back, to take it to Cook to be cleaned. And abruptly the stench of shit hit my nostrils as I nearly kicked over a large bucket in my path. >>Ugh.<< I  nearly retched. >>Is this yours?<<

He merely shrugged, and with an expansive gesture, indicated the chain.

>>If I get rid of this... clean it out for you... will you give me the bowl back, when you’re done?<< I suggested.

For a moment, he drew his head back, and merely studied me, with a look of almost regal arrogance, as if he were a king on a throne, not a madman chained semi-naked in a cellar; then he conceded to nod. >>As you will.<<

The tone of his formal ‘you’ still somehow managed to convey insolence, and not respect, but I took the bucket outside and emptied it, then hosed it down until it was clean. Thinking of the emaciated thinness of his body, I looked about for a large plastic bottle, then rinsed that out and filled it with drinking water.

I returned to find him sitting, wrapped up in a strange fleshy knot, at the opposite end of the table, with the bowl, now licked clean, left like an offering on the end nearest the door. So he had enough sense to understand a deal. I replaced the bucket where I had found it, then left the gallon drum of water in the place of the bowl.

Then I retreated to the door to watch what he would do. Slowly, he approached, then opened the water drum and sniffed at it cautiously. He took a tentative taste, and swallowed some, but then he did something very odd. Instead of raising the drum to his mouth to drink, he poured a little out, carefully, into his hand, then he started, almost daintily, to wash porridge, and dried-on blood and bits of crud out of his beard, occasionally stopping to scratch at it with the hammer-head as if it were really bothering him.

 

When I came back again, I was prepared for his lightning-fast reflexes, and did not let him snatch the bowl away from me. Trying to imitate Cook’s schoolmarmish tone, I told him, with an exaggeratedly formal ‘Sie’, >>If you want it, you’ve got to learn to say please and thank you like a civilised human being.<<

He simply burst into peels of maniacal laughter, cackling away like the madman he was. But abruptly, he stopped, and scrambled over to sit, cross-legged on the edge of the table facing me. >>You want me to beg, for my basic human needs. And you have the impertinence to call this civilisation?<<

>>No<< I said softly. >>I just don’t want you to hit me.<< Gently, I extended the bowl towards him. For several heartbeats, he stared at it in silence, but abruptly, he reached out and grabbed, not the bowl, but my wrist, seizing me and holding me fast. He leaned forwards and gazed down into my eyes as I struggled, trying to get free. He was surprisingly strong for such an emaciated, half-starved creature.

But as he caught my eye, finally he spoke. >>Thanks for the water.<< And with that, he released me, and swiftly relieved me of the bowl, skittering across the metal table-top like a spider to huddle in the corner and bolt down his food.

I emptied his bucket. I refilled the water drum. I took his bowl when he was done eating. We didn’t speak again, though I watched him warily, and he watched me with curiosity.

 

Again and again, I came to him, bringing food and water, emptying his pail. The wildness never left his eyes, but he started to look up at my approach, with something resembling the ghost of amusement. >>Aaaaaa<< he would crow in that rusty-door voice. >>The approach of human civilisation. Please and thank you. The barbarians at the gate. The _order_ of things. Must be maintained! << And each phrase reinforced with a little swing and thwack of his hammer-fist as punctuation, smirking all the while, as if this passed for a madman’s sense of humour.

It became a kind of a game. I grew to even have affection for the ritual as he swiped with his hammer-fist and I feinted, then left the bowl for him anyway. I didn’t hold it against him, as he feigned to hit me. After all, the first duty of a prisoner was to escape. How was he to know that I was not the jailor? I was merely another captive.

I could not leave the house, either, you see.

>>You must not leave the building<< my father had impressed upon me since childhood. >>You see there is no Time. If you leave the building, it is all broken. In Time, you cease to exist.<<

I mused over this question, when next I visited my fellow captive. >>How is it, that I can only exist in here. And cease to exist, out there?<<

>>Aaaaahhhh<< he cried, looking up, his head alert, his ears pricked like a great, lanky animal. >>To cease to exist, one needs Time. Existence... to Non-Existence... it is an Event. Here, there is no Time, so there can be no Events.<<

>>Yes, yes, I know<< I muttered. >>They have told me this since birth.<<

>>How long?<< he demanded.

>>What?<< I sputtered. I didn’t even understand the question. How long was _what_? How long was a piece of string? How long was his hair? How long was the operating table on which he crouched? What was he talking about?

>>How _long_? << he insisted, even more urgently, then stopped eating and went off to fetch the book. As he dragged it into the light, I saw that it was an old-fashioned Bible, and wondered if he had one of those religious kinds of madness, that was going to deliver me a sermon. But instead he turned the book upside down, and flipped open to the back, where the pages were left blank, for writing in baptisms or a family tree. >>How many marks?<< he demanded, thumping at the page with his hammer-fist, and I suddenly noticed that he had somehow managed to make batches of tiny black markings on the page.

I counted them quickly. >>...thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. There are fifteen marks.<<

>>Two _weeks_ << he said softly, as if imparting some great wisdom with this impossible nonsense word. >>Fifteen times, you have come. I’ve counted. Do you come once a _day_? Every few _hours_? As much as a _week_? How long? << Again, these nonsense words that meant absolutely nothing. Why was I even talking to a madman? He made no sense. What was this thing whose length he was referring to? What on earth was a week? What was an hour? Was such a thing animal, vegetable or mineral?

>>I don’t understand what you’re asking<< I replied, bewildered.

He stopped hammering and looked at me with almost infinite sadness in his eyes, as they met mine, and he seemed to really see me, and observe me properly. And I suddenly noticed that under the dirt and grime of his face, his eyes were an extraordinarily pretty shade of blue. Unexpectedly, he allowed himself the intimacy of an informal ‘du’. >>Of course you don’t. How could you? Thrown into reasonlessness. Not existence. Not non-existence. No Time.<< And then he became genuinely agitated, hammering at the bible with new anger, as if he wished to propel himself bodily through the text with the force of his blows.

>>OK, OK, we won’t talk about it if it makes you upset<< I tried to sooth, but the madman was unsoothable, muttering his nonsense words and scratching petulantly at his beard with his one good hand. I saw again that it was encrusted with dirt, and worried he was scratching a hole in his face with that hammer.

 

Back when there was still Time, the madman worked with my father. He was a great genius, they say, a Visionary, even. But then Time ran out, after The Incident. Some say the Visionary caused it; others say the Visionary tried to prevent it. I don’t know. They tried torture to get an answer out of the Visionary, to find out what had gone wrong. It didn’t work, of course. His mind had snapped. Gone. All emptied out. Completely disordered. They couldn’t say, if it was the torture, or it was The Incident that had done it.

He still has his visions, though. About these crazy words I don’t understand – days, weeks, hours – whatever they might be. Just not much use to anyone now.

 

When I came again, he was calmer. He even moved over to sit on the edge of the table nearest to me as I approached, and smiled obsequiously and gifted me with a very loud and theatrical >>Please.<<

I gave him the food, then heaved the water drum up to the table, but this visit I had a gift for him. Digging in my pocket, I pulled out a small bar of soap, and laid it next to the water. >>This might help<< I suggested >>With your toilet.<<

Absolutely astonished, the madman looked at the soap for nearly a minute, then burst into peels and peels of snorting laughter. I stepped back, and looked at him, a little hurt, but as the laughter subsided, he poked at the soap with his hammer-fist, then held it up in front of me with his whole, but clumsy right hand. >>And how am I supposed to lather?<<

>>Oh.<< I hadn’t thought about that. But slowly, a plan formed in my brain. >>I’ve got an idea. Wait, I’ll be right back.<<

I went upstairs and dug through Housekeeper’s things until I found a washcloth. Then I nicked a large, metal bowl of the sort Cook used to mix big batches of dough, and then seized a towel, and trotted back down to the cellar. In the washroom, I filled the bowl with water, then wrapped the soap in the flannel and submerged it.

When I came back to the madman’s cell, I found him fast asleep. The chain was cruel; there was only one place in the very centre of the table that it could reach when he was lying flat, so he was curled up in a ball, his huge bony shoulders at a stiff angle, and his legs splayed.

>>Wake up, sleepy head<< I told him as I poked gently at one of the shoulders. >>You’re going to have a bath.<<

He looked at me, quite startled as he woke. >>You’ve been gone for _ages_. I will never trust you again. <<

I looked back at him as if he were a madman, which of course he was. >>I don’t understand these words you use. What is an _age_? Is it like a _week_? An _hour_? You don’t make any sense, madman. <<

>>Why should I make any sense. I am reasonless, am I not? Emptied out. Mad.<<

>>Alright, alright, madman<< I conceded. >>Now take off this mackintosh, and I’ll bathe you.<<

Clanking a bit from the chain, he did as I asked, sloughing the rubber coat off his shoulders, though he didn’t take it off all the way; he tied it loosely around his groin, as if to preserve his modesty. A madman, with modesty! He smirked at me, as if he understood the absurdity of this idea, and muttered >>Civilisation, you understand... and its discontents.<<

He lay down again, and allowed me to start washing him. I started with his face, scrubbing at that scrabbly beard, to get all of the food and spittle and crusted dirt out of it. Then, slowly, I moved lower, carefully sponge-bathing him, lifting his arms to get at his stinky armpits, as the almost translucent pale white of his skin emerged from under the filth. Beneath the grime, there were dustings of brown spots, which I realised were freckles. I don’t know why they pleased me, but they did. And there were odd scars everywhere, cigarette burns, puncture wounds, lacerations that seemed barely healed. Those did not please me so much; they worried me greatly. And that odd, mangled stump where his hand had been. It took some persuasion to get the hammer off him, but the skin underneath was chaffed and there was a grubby line around the leather cuff, which badly needed a wash. I resolved on my next scavenging trip, to try to find some lotion to apply to the half-healed calluses where the strap that held it in place had rubbed against his flesh. He wouldn’t let me wash his groin, but raised each leg for me, so that I could wash behind his knees, and attend to those long feet, with their almost monkey-like toes. I don’t know why, but I found the toes particularly cute, and paid them special attention, scrubbing carefully in the crevices as he splayed them helpfully for me. But those toenails! I mentally added a nail clipper to my list of items to scavenge. I washed everything thoroughly, lathered it with the washcloth, then rinsed it and dried it with the towel. He seemed pleased with the result as he examined himself. Already he smelled and looked so much better. And yet, that smelly groin bothered me.

>>Come on, move the mackintosh, let me wash you there<< I urged him.

>>The mad are never allowed an iota of privacy, are we? We must be watched, surveilled, observed, always, as the price of our madness.<<

>>Alright then, how about I leave you the washcloth and the soapy water, and you attend to your own privates?<<

>>You will turn your back?<< cajoled the madman, in a soft, seductive sort of purr, and like a complete fool, I forgot the dangerous game we were playing, and complied. For a few minutes, I heard nothing but the sound of splashing and bathing, as if he were, truly, only washing himself, followed by the heavy rustle of his rubber coat as he redressed.

Then abruptly, there was total blackness, as I felt a heavy, wet sack come down over my head, and a rope around my neck, suddenly constricting my throat until I could barely breathe. It took me a moment to work out that he had thrown the towel over my head to blind me, and was now trying to strangle me with the washcloth that I had foolishly given him.

>>The keys<< he hissed. >>Where are they?<<

>>In the lock!<< I just about managed to gasp, as the wet towel constricted tighter. Terrified, I wanted to scream at him to just take them and go, but even as I did, my heart contracted with fear for him.

>>Fetch them!<< he hissed, and just as quickly, the pressure on my throat was released.

Gasping for air, I unwrapped the soggy towel from around my head, and ran to the door. At that moment, I turned, and we locked eyes. I had made my mistake, in turning my back, but he had made his, in letting me go. Freed from his headlock, I could have been through that door, and up the stairs, screaming for the guards – and he realised it at the same moment that I did. He lunged towards me, but the chain caught him, and for a moment, he just hung, straining against it as if he could pull it from the ceiling, before his strength failed and he slumped back, defeated by his iron collar. I was free to go. But as he saw the expression of betrayal on my face, my sense of outrage, the hangdog expression on his face turned, slowly, to shame.

I don’t know what stopped me. I paused by the door, took the keys from the lock and walked back towards him, rummaging through the many keys I knew – the key to his cell, the key to my bedroom, the key to the linen cupboard – and the few I didn’t.

>>Let me see the chain<< I said softly. For a moment, he stared at me, as if surprised I had come back of my own will, but then he bent his head towards me. I could see, as I parted his long, tangled hair, from the odd, slightly triangular shape of the lock’s hole, that none of my keys would fit it, but I tried them all anyway. And as I twisted away at the metal, I tried to warn him. >>Look, even if I get this collar off you, you won’t get far, once you’re out of this room. There’s a guard with a pistol who patrols the hall, and a sentry with a rifle on the stairs to the outside. Don’t be fucking stupid... If you want something, ask me. But don’t take unnecessary risks... unless you _want_ to die. <<

As I reached the end of the keys, I shrugged helplessly, and held the bunch up, as if offering them to him, but as he realised the whole exercise had been useless, he sloped away, then scurried off, lurking, recalcitrant, at the far end of the table, looking very sorry for himself indeed. But abruptly the self-pity and remorse gave way to a sudden burst of anger

>>Why are you so nice to me anyway?<< he abruptly spat. >>I’m not your pet. I’m your family’s bitter enemy.<<

My lip quivered as I grasped towards the truth. >>Because I don’t have anyone else to take care of.<<

>>A stupid reason<< he snorted, folding and unfolding his long, grasshopper legs underneath him. >>A bloody dangerously sentimental reason.<<

>>And neither do you<< I told him, wrapping my wounded pride around me like a cloak as I pocketed my keys again, then picked up basin, washcloth and towel to go.


	2. Kapitel Zwei: No Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Visionary attempts to demonstrate to the narrator exactly how strange the flow of time is, in the Institute.

We conducted our brief business in silence from then on. He lurked at the far end of the table, muttering to himself about reasonlessness as he alternately scratched at his beard with the hammer-fist, then thwacked angrily at the bible. I left a bowl of porridge, and took the bucket to empty and the water drum to refill. When I came back, the porridge was gone, but he didn’t even look at me.

Silence again, my next visit. And the next. I could hear him muttering to himself as I stood outside the door, about Time, strange words I didn’t understand, the ‘to-come’, the ‘gone-ness’. But when I pushed the door open again, he would fall silent, refusing even to watch me with those glittering eyes.

By the fifth visit (I, too, had started to make a mark on a sheet of paper, for each visit to the madman) I was bored. The house was restless. Cook and Housekeeper gathered round the small wind-up radio to listen to my father make speeches. My father’s speeches bored me. They were always the same. >>Listen to your fear>> he would say, very close up to the microphone, and intimate, like he was both shouting and somehow whispering in your ear. He was considered, locally, to be a very good orator. >>There is no Time. The Time for peace and love has gone. There is only hate. We must hate, what has been done, and those who did it. With the power of our hate, if we concentrate our hate hard enough on our enemies, our enemies without, and our enemies within, we can bring back Time. But until there is Time, give me your hate. Give me your fear. I know best. I am the Professor, and I will guide you through this time of no Time. Stay strong. Stay afraid.<<

It was always the same. It was so boring. I was so tired of being afraid.

I went to see the madman again, though there was no food to take.

He actually looked surprised. >>You’re early.<<

>>Again with these nonsense words<< I laughed. >>What is _early_? <<

He laughed a strangled laugh, then screwed up his face, scratching at his beard with the hammer. >>Time<< he said, slowly and carefully. >>Is a sequence of events. Before, and after. Cause, and effect. Early – before its proper time; and late – after its proper time. But the connections have been lost. Each cell... connects only to itself. The to-come and the gone-ness should stand, on either side of the vortex that is now...<< As he spoke, he held up his hammer-fist, and gestured first on one side of it – ‘to-come’ – and then on the other – ‘gone-ness’ – then tapped the crux of the hammer itself, as he said the word ‘now’. >>But the connections have been lost.<<

>>Well, what are the connections?<<

>>Time!<< he almost howled, thwacking with hammer against the badly-beaten book between his feet. >>Time, time, time. The connection is time. Oh, to be free, to be _free_... <<

As he contorted his long, thin body, and smashed, howling, at the book, I recoiled at his sudden burst of madness. His mind had snapped, I tried to remind myself. Of course he didn’t make any sense, he spoke only in this confusion of nonsense-words. As he howled and flailed, I could see the madness present in his face, his eyes, his actions. But at other moments, I could sense some great intelligence, lurking there, behind the insanity, trying desperately the make contact and break through.

>>It is only a unicellular organism<< he was muttering to himself, with distressed urgency. >>It has no connections. It is disconnected. Dis-connect. Dispersed of its connections. Empty, unknowing of its own emptiness, because it has never known fullness... _TIME_! << he howled, looking up to meet my eye again and his voice seemed desperately trying to communicate something I could not understand.

I shook my head slowly. >>I wish I could understand you somehow.<<

>>Understand?<< he said slowly, with a hint of a mocking tone. >>Tell me, child...<<

>>I’m not a child<< I interrupted, irritated at being patronised.

Raising his head, he stopped and looked at me, really looked at me, peering into my face carefully as if observing me, though he had studied my movements often. >>You are correct. You are no child. Tell me, being, what is the first thing you remember?<<

>>What?<< I sputtered, confused by the question. >>I have always just been in the Institute.<<

>>The _first_ thing << repeated the madman.

I backed up a little, remembering the reach of his chain, then closed my eyes and screwed up my face, concentrating hard. >>I remember my birth. That must have come first, surely.<<

>>Impossible<< he cackled.

My eyes snapped open. >>Well, don’t ask me questions, if you don’t want to know the answers.<<

>>How can you remember your own birth?<< he demanded.

>>Because... I’ve seen it. Over and over again. Every morning I go up to see my mother. She is there, in the room, sweaty and labouring, her belly huge and full of me. Something is wrong. It’s going on too long, she’s in too much pain, she’s not breathing. The midwife shouts to call the doctor, but Housekeeper says there’s no time. The midwife reaches inside, she catches hold of me, pulls me screaming and bloody from my mother’s body. The cord is wrapped around my neck, but she pulls it free, and I gurgle and cough, then start to cry. My mother smiles, weakly, but then her head lolls back against the pillows, her colour is all wrong, she isn’t breathing, even as I start wailing. They place me on her breast, and then... and then...<<

>>And then?<< asked the madman.

>>And then... it starts all over again. Every visit to my mother’s room, the same. Like everything else in this boring house, always the same.<< But then I looked up, and confessed. >>Except for you. You’re the only thing here that is ever different. That’s why I like you. You’re not boring.<<

>>How can you be present at your own birth, and also here? Your birth _should_ have been _years_ ago << he pointed out, and suddenly it hit me, this tremendous sense of _wrong_ ness I could not quite put my finger on.

>>I... but it’s like that for everyone. Isn’t it?<<

He shrugged, those wide, bony shoulders twitching up and back inside the voluminous space of that smelly black raincoat. >>I cannot go back and look at my own birth. _Time_ – real time, not this nonsense Non-Time – does not work that way. <<

>>Well, you’re a madman<< I pointed out.

His eyes glittered, and he actually smiled, showing his filthy teeth. >>Am I?<< As he moved and stretched, the chain above his head clanked and started swinging. >>I’m very hungry<< he complained. >>It must be time for dinner. Go and get me my food... _please_. <<

>>But how would you know?<< I sneered, still feeling this uneasy sense of discontent at the _wrong_ ness that he had somehow triggered in my mind.

>>Because I can _feel_ the passage of time << he whispered, as if afraid to say such nonsensical words aloud.

>>Well, you’re a madman who believes he has extrasensory perception of some kind, then. What a load of rubbish. I’ll go upstairs and check... just to prove you wrong.<<

When I went upstairs, I was astonished to find that he was right. On the counter in the kitchen, Cook had left two bowls of porridge, one for me, and one for the madman. They were even still warm.

I took both, and went downstairs to the cellar to eat with the madman for a change.

He smirked when he saw me. >>Do you see? Not so mad, am I.<<

>>You wouldn’t be locked up in here if you weren’t mad<< I pointed out, dropping his bowl in front of him, then sitting, cross-legged, on the floor opposite. >>My father is a scientist. He understands these things.<<

>>You should write down<< said the madman >>the things that happen to you, in order. So you remember. So you understand.<<

I was about to protest, then thought about it, and thought, what’s the harm, indulging a maniac in his mania. >>Alright.<< Then I paused, watching the madman eat, inelegantly smearing porridge all over his beard. >>If I get you a pen, will you do the same?<<

>>I can’t write<< he suddenly insisted, holding up the hammer-fist.

>>I don’t see why not. Your madness doesn’t seem to have affected your ability to form words, even nonsense ones like _week_ and _hour_ and _years_ , whatever these _years_ of yours might be. <<

Again, he shook the hammer-fist, then slammed it down. >>I’m left-handed<< he said. >>Those... civilised and sane humans of the Professor’s... they maimed my left hand deliberately, so I could not _write_. <<

I stared at the disfigured lump of wood and metal. >>Why would they do that?<<

>>If I could write, I could work. And if I could work, and study, and... experiment? I could restart Time.<<

>>But my father and his men are working hard to fix Time. Trying to find the solution.<<

The madman’s laugh was hollow and dry as he scratched at his beard with the hammer-fist. >>And you actually believe that.<<

>>If there were something to be done, they would be doing it!<< I protested.

>>Because there is no Time, the Professor gets to run everything. Don’t you see?<< His voice was almost plaintive, and for once, it scared me, how little madness there was in it.

>>I don’t believe you<< I spat, and got up and ran from the room.

>>Try it yourself!<< he cried after me as I fled. >>Write things down. Just keep a diary. Write everything down. Then you will see.<<

 

I had to go to my father’s office, to ask for a pen and some notepaper. My father pushed his spectacles down his nose and peered over the top of them suspiciously. >>Now what do you want a pen and paper for? There is no time for writing now. You know that writing is dangerous. Writing is seditious. You know that there are seditionaries, terrorists, who wish to harm your father with their writing. We can only trust information from the _radio_. <<

>>Oh, I don’t want to write anything seditious<< I assured him. >>I want to be a great scientist like you are, Papa. Surely, though, to be a good scientist, one must take notes. Record the weather, the rainfall and so on.<<

He smiled, pleased, as flattery always worked on him. >>Yes, of course, little one. I will find you a notebook for your observations.<<

I kept two notebooks, side by side. The first, starting on the front page, was comprised of columns of careful observations: the weather, cloud cover, rainfall, and so forth. The second started from the back, upside-down, a few pages in. And in this notebook, I wrote down what I did.

And after a few daily pages had filled up, I noticed something very odd. Every page was the same. I visited my mother. Housekeeper taught me how to read. Cook scolded me for sneaking a spoonful of the porridge on the stove, before it was ready. My father brought me a gift: a small silver reproduction of a Viking handaxe from a museum where he had delivered a lecture. I went to his office to ask for paper for his notes. It was all exactly the same. Except for the visits with the madman, it was identical. I lost track of how many times I tasted the porridge and felt it scalding my mouth, how many times I watched my mother give birth, how many times I received, delighted, the gift of the axe, for I dearly loved Vikings. And yet no matter how many countless times I wrote these things down anew, there was only ever one axe displayed in a place of pride above my desk. And each time I woke afresh, it was not there again.

The madman laughed when I showed him the diary, and scratched at his beard with the hammer. >>I tell you, I am damned sick of that wretched porridge. It is always exactly the same, yes?<<

>>How many times?<< I demanded of him. >>How many times?<<

The madman said nothing, he just grasped his bedraggled Bible and thrust it towards me, flipping it open to show the page I had already seen, which now had dozens of black marks bundled across it. Then he flipped it over to show the page before, covered completely with marks, and then the page before that, and the page before that.

As I stared at all those marks, he started to laugh. >>There is no time? No Time? It’s a despicable lie<< he howled. >>There is all the time in the _world_. <<

He laughed and laughed, and howled, and howled, until suddenly he found himself crying, scratching at his face as the salt of his tears mingled with his crusted beard, tearing at his skin, not with the blunt end of his hammer, but with the sharp, uncut nails of his other hand.

>>Don’t...<< I urged. >>Don’t!<< And without thinking, I reached out and took his hand, and pulled it away from his face, holding it tenderly while I tried to wipe away the tears. And as I picked, gently, at the tiny clump of crusted porridge that was causing all the itchy bother, I realised I had stepped entirely too close to him, and I was now inside the reach of his chain. I looked down, even as I finished cleaning his beard, and realised as I felt something solid touch my skin, that the deadly head of his hammer-fist was aimed exactly at my jugular. A single move could kill me.

I counted ten breaths, my chest rising and falling in panic, waiting for the last gasp before the hammer ripped out my throat or closed off my windpipe. But neither of us moved. We just stared into each other’s faces. He really did have the most extraordinarily blue eyes, with a sharp expression that belied the intelligence beneath that terrible madness.

>>Well, go on then<< I said quietly, barely daring to move my lips. >>If you’re going to kill me, then kill me.<<

He didn’t move the hammer, but I realised I was holding his other hand very tight against my chest. >>I want you<< he said. >>To touch my face again.<<

I did as I was told. I reached out, and very gently, stroked that patchy, matted thicket of his beard. It was so ugly, and so itchy to the touch, I couldn’t imagine how much trouble it must have given him, though his skin beneath was dappled with freckles like a little boy. He closed his eyes and let out a kind of moan, though he did not remove the hammer from my throat.

>>Do you know how long it’s been<< he whispered. >>Since anyone has touched me like that?<<

>>How could I?<< I said. >>There’s no Time.<<

He opened his eyes and smiled as I scratched again at the beard that was clearly bothering him. >>I could murder someone for a nice, clean shave<< he laughed, and then lowered the hammer, pushing it against my stomach in an oddly affectionate poke. >>But not you.<<

I let out a deep sigh of relief, as my heartrate, which had been pounding in my throat, slowed to normal. >>Why not?<<

He shrugged elegantly. >>I don’t have anyone else to care for.<<


	3. Kapitel Drei: Skin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Visionary allows himself to be shaved, and his skin is a revelation.
> 
> The Professor leads a raid against the Seditionaries, and their leader is captured.

I wanted to do something for him, for my madman, to prove that he could trust me. So I combed the house for the required supplies. I waited until my father went out, and then I crept to his bathroom, and took his straight razor, and the dish where he kept his shaving brush and soap. And as I entered the bathroom, I realised, that I already knew how to shave. I had watched my father do it a hundred times before. A thousand times. Five thousand times? I had no idea. Then quietly, ever so quietly, I slipped to the cupboard where the guards kept restraints for the prisoners, straitjackets, manacles, bed-fetters, that kind of thing. I searched through them, looking for a triangular key, but failing to find that, I grabbed a pair of handcuffs, and slipped downstairs.

The madman was asleep. He looked so innocent when he slept, his face free of the madness, just relaxed and slightly blissful. I went out into the hall and fetched a bench. Then, putting the soapdish and more importantly, the razor, down on the bench, just out of his reach, I walked over to look at him, amazed by the change. But as I stood and watched, a nightmare must have come over him, because he started to jerk and twitch, muttering in his sleep as he started to thrash about, raising his arms to protect himself from unseen assailants.

>>Free...<< he muttered. >>Free, I will be free. To the Island. When everything collapses. When everything becomes empty... when all the nothing has emptied out.... to the Island!<<

I wanted to wake him gently, but realised I didn’t even know his name. >>Hey<< I said softly, touching him on the side of the arm, but he shook me off. >>Hey, hey. You! Wake up, you’re dreaming.<< I gave him another shove, harder, and he came to, screaming his head off. >>No, no, ssshh, ssshhhhh, you were only dreaming<< I tried to sooth as he flailed about, but I found myself pulling him closer to stop his arms from lashing out at me, pulling him into my arms and holding him tight as he awoke, and clambered to what remained of his senses. >>Only dreams.<<

>>They’re not dreams<< he whimpered against my shoulder, though he stilled as I smoothed down his long, shaggy hair. The softness of it surprised me, after the harshness of his bristly beard. >>They’re visions.<<

>>Tell me about them<< I urged, surprised to find that I enjoyed it, holding him close and stroking his hair.

>>I can’t<< he moaned, rubbing his cheek back and forth against the fabric of my shirt. >>It’s all the maths, all the physics... such great force. Such great force. All the molecules. Every single one. No... it’s too much. It’s too much for any mind to bear. I can’t work it out.<<

>>You kept talking about an island.<<

At that, he finally pulled away from me, eyeing me suspiciously. >>Yes. The Island. To be free... to go to the Island. But it is dangerous.<<

>>Everything is dangerous<< I shrugged, thinking of my father’s opinion of writing. >>Look, I’ve got something for you, but you’re going to have to work with me on this.<<

>>Work with you?<< he laughed. >>A madman and a child?<<

>>I’m not a child<< I grumbled.

>>I keep forgetting. Sometimes you look like a child. Sometimes you’re an adult. Sometimes you’re very old. It took me a while to realise you were all the same person.<<

I turned and looked at him, puzzled, but then again, I kept forgetting. He really was mad. His mind had snapped. >>Look, I’m going to have to do it for you, because I don’t trust you with the razor.<< As I held up the razor and shaving brush, his eyes suddenly lit up.

>>Yes!<< he exclaimed, then remembered to add. >>Please.<<

>>But I’m going to have to put these on you. Because you’re so quick and you jump so fast when you’re startled, I don’t want you making any sudden moves when I’ve got a razor in my hand. For your protection... and for mine.<< Slowly, I held up the handcuffs.

The madman laughed, and held out his wrists. >>Kinky<< he said.

I chained his hands behind his back, then I set to work. I got a good lather up, and covered his face, moving the brush in slow circles to get under all those horrible, itchy bristles, then slowly, very carefully tried the razor against his skin. He held his head at just the right angle, eyes almost closed, but still watching me carefully, as I moved the long blade down, going with the direction of his beard’s growth. It was so close I barely dared to breathe for fear I might nick him, but the beard came away in great stripes, as I flicked the foamy stubble onto a towel. Down one side of his face, then close around his neck as he arched his head back, straining all the muscles of his neck and shoulders to get me a good angle, then I moved around to the other side and repeated the process on his other cheek. And when I was done with his face, I took his long, greasy hair in my hands, and carefully trimmed the front, cutting out a fringe to the line of his eyebrows, so that he could see.

And when I towelled him off, and stepped back to admire my handiwork (only a tiny bead of blood on one side, where I had misjudged the angle of his jawbone) I looked at him, and suddenly realised he was _beautiful_. I had never seen a man so pretty, those fine features all hidden under that mat of ugly hair. He had high, arched cheekbones, a long, sharply pointed nose, a delicately defined jaw, with perfect hollows on either side of his sharp little chin, and huge, slightly protruding, pillow-like lips. I felt my heart thudding in my chest, suddenly a little afraid, for reasons that had nothing to do with that dangerous hammer-fist of his.

Barely daring to breath, I put the razor down, and reached out to touch his face. I touched the smoothness of his chin, stripped of hair. Then I walked my fingers up the long, slightly crooked length of his nose. I traced his arched eyebrows, his sharp cheekbones. He had a tiny mole, just below his mouth, so I pushed it, like a button, then gently moved my fingers upwards, to run them over his soft lips. As my fingers touched unexpected wetness, abruptly, with that lightning swiftness, his lips parted, and revealed teeth, which caught my fingers and held them. I waited for the bite, waited for the pain when the madman attacked, but instead he just held me gently, the pressure of his teeth just enough to let me know he could hurt me, if he wanted, but he was choosing not to, playing with me like a cat batting at a moth. And all the while, he stared into my eyes, his lips twitching upwards into a smile, as I felt a shudder, a strange desire that was something like hunger, go right through my body.

But as I stared at him, terrified yet intrigued, he seemed to grow impatient. He unclenched his teeth and jerked his head back, away from me. >>Are you done? May I be released?<<

>>Yes, of course<< I said, tripping over my words as I stumbled backwards, my hands all tingly with the memory of his bite as I grasped blindly behind me. Disoriented and dazed by what the sensation of his teeth had done to my skin, it took several moments of fumbling to retrieve the keys and release his hands.

Grumbling slightly, he shook out his arms, and rubbed his muscles the best he could with his one good hand, before stroking, gently, at his face. >>Yes, that’s much better. I can feel it<< he sighed, rolling his head back and forth as if to fix a crook in his head. >>But why do you keep staring at me? Am I such a monster?<<

>>Because you’re... you’re...<< I had to swallow nervously to stop myself from just blurting out ‘ _but you’re beautiful_ ’. >>You don’t look anything like I expected.<<

He shook his head swiftly, to shake out any last clippings of his hair, then shoved his fingers up into it, leaving it sticking up in a greasy peak, seeming pleased that it was out of his eyes. >>How so.<<

>>Well... you’re not...<< I tried to think how to describe it. >>Well, you’re not like my father, and the others...<<

>>No, nothing like your father<< he spat, and thumped his hammer fist.

>>You’re not all... wrinkled up, deeply lined, kind of shrunken looking, like Cook and Housekeeper and my father. Your face is... well, it’s lovely and smooth, taut, like mine.<<

The madman burst into cackles of laughter. >>You mean, I am young, like you. Not old, like your father. Yes. I was five and twenty, when Time stopped.<<

>> _Young_? _Old_? Your mad words are so meaningless << I sighed, disappointed, as if I thought I would somehow have affected some miracle cure of his madness, when I had shaved him and cleaned him up. >>Five and twenty what? _Weeks_? _Ages_? Your time-babble means nothing to me. <<

But the madman would not stop laughing, as if what I had said was hilarious to him. >>Five and twenty weeks... my god, and they say that I am the madman.<< He laughed until he wore himself out, then smiled at me. >>Come here.<<

>>Why?<< I moved towards him anyway.

>>Because I want to do this.<< And he encircled me with his arms, and pulled me closer to him, then laid his head, very gently, against my chest, nuzzling at my flesh with his smooth, beautiful face. At that moment, I suddenly understood, what it was I was hungry for: the feel of his skin against mine.

 

All of a sudden, the house was in an uproar. News came over the radio that one of the seditionaries who fought against my father had been captured! In all the confusion and disarray, I managed to wash and restore my father’s shaving paraphernalia, and even managed to steal some food to squirrel away and take to my lover. The madman. My mad lover. Were we lovers? Was it love, to lie as close together as the chains allowed and press skin against skin, almost mad with longing, though I didn’t know what for? It felt like love, the way my heart beat so much faster. A mad word. Love. A mad love.

There had been fighting, outside. Four of the terrorists had got away, but one had been captured. The leader, my father’s men were insisting, with great pride, the one they called Mark. Sure, they had lost two soldiers in the skirmish, but there would be reprisals. They would definitely be avenged. But the leader had been captured! And they were bringing him over, stuffed into the back of a car. Interrogation was in order. Perhaps even the application of physical treatment. They had learned, from their terrible mistakes in their bungled interrogation of the Visionary, and during this inquisition there would be no snapped minds or madness to lapse into. They wanted the terrorist sharp, and conscious.

The basement was rearranged in a hurry. Restraints were prepared, where the new prisoner would be hung up in chains. The guard was moved, from the end of my madman’s corridor, to a spot where he could watch this Mark more closely. Of course I would not take the new prisoner his food, that would be far too dangerous. The interrogators would use food and its supply as a pressure point, for manipulation of the new prisoner. I was so afraid that they would take away my food-bringing duties for my beloved prisoner, and give him to these interrogators, but I was lucky. No one cared about the Visionary, now that they had Mark, The Leader of Sedition.

I went to look at him, from a safe distance, naturally, this Leader of Sedition. He was just a boy. I had been expecting an ‘old’ man like my father, worn-faced and wily. But this one was smooth-faced, handsome in a way, with curly blond hair and a face that reminded me achingly of something I had seen before, though I could not say what. There was nothing new in the house, ever, only the same things, again and again, so it should not have surprised me that the Leader of Sedition looked familiar. And yet it nagged at me, it bothered me, in the same way that the _wrong_ ness bothered me sometimes in my conversations with the Visionary.

My lover. My mad lover. Oh how I loved him, though I did not trust him. To lie in his arms was to stop the entire world. I went to him as often as I dared. I took him extra food when I could get it, and his emaciated frame slowly became merely thin. I washed him. I shaved him every five visits. We still used the restraints – not because I was afraid of him, but because I think he liked them. And then we would try, on that cold metal operating table, to lie together.

To make it warm, he would lay down his ratty old rubber mackintosh, then I would lie on top of it, always quaking and afraid, terrified that this time, his mind would snap, and I would get not the softness of an embrace, but that hard, sharp fist of his hammer shoved up into my windpipe. But no. He would lay down the best he could, trying not to pull the chain so taught it hurt, and then we would wrap our arms and legs around one another, just hungry for the feel of another human being’s skin against our own. For I had simply never known the sensation of human skin against skin. It was intoxicating. It was electric. It was sheer delight.

Mostly, we talked. He tried to teach me all his mad time-words, and I tried, with all my heart, to enter into his madness. A _second_ was one beat of the heart, when I was lying at rest. Sixty seconds in a minute. Sixty minutes in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Seven days in a week. Four weeks in a month, but no, sometimes it was 30 days or even 31. He had given them all names, bless his heart, like I had once named my stuffed animals. January, March, May. I liked May, it was easy to remember, and it sounded like a girl’s name.

And he would drill me on it, his mad numbers. How many seconds in an hour? 60? 30? I don’t know. 3,600. How many days in a year? Alright, 360. No, no, 365. There seemed to be no method to his madness, no pattern that I could distinguish, though I certainly tried to please him. And when I pleased him, we would embrace, sometimes with hands on faces, sometimes with arms around bodies, and sometimes with lips on lips, and lips on lips was the best thing, I had no idea my mouth could feel so alive until his tongue was inside mine and wiggling around like a fish I was trying to catch with my teeth and I felt my skin almost burning up with the longing for him.

Breathe in, breathe out. Feel your heartbeat? That’s a second long. Yes, now can we kiss for two minutes, and I will count the breaths because my heartbeat speeds up when we kiss. Time. There is no Time when we are in each other’s arms. But then the other man, the Leader of Sedition, he cries out in pain, far away, at the end of the other hall, and my Visionary stiffens, and goes all tense with fear, and will not kiss.

>>The Island<< he muttered, growing more and more agitated, climbing off me and darting this way and that on the tabletop. >>We need to go to the Island. Swim, or sail, or fly like a bird. We need to get to the Island. There we can be free.<<

The screaming went on for a while, then finally stopped. And though I tried my best to hold him tight and calm him down, when the screaming stopped, my lover became even more agitated than before. I wanted to stay all through the dark, but he had more sense than me, and said I’d be missed. A madman with more sense than me? What did I know? I was in love. I wandered through the house as if in a dream, as if every minute spent doing the same rituals over and over was just never quite real any more. I kissed my mother distractedly as her face lolled to the side and she stopped breathing, but it seemed a pale shadow of the kisses I gave my lover. I scalded my mouth on Cook’s porridge again and again, but the sensation of burning was not as pleasant as the sensation of burning up when my lover pressed his mad skin against mine.

The Leader of Sedition proved more tractable than the Visionary. Under the strict administration of truth-giving drugs, he let slip intelligence, revealing the secret base camp of two of his accomplices. My father’s men raided it, and killed a woman – they said it was the Seditionary’s sister – and brought back her bloodied red heart as proof of the deed. If only they’d waited a little while, the troop leader reported, they could have had two of the terrorists. But no, said my father, it was better to wait, and pick them off, one by one. It would instil more fear that way. And fear, after all, was power.

I thought of the radio addresses, where he insisted upon delivering this message to the people – that fear and hate were power – and wondered who that power was supposed to be for.


	4. Kapitel Vier: How To Stop Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The girl discovers the one thing that will make the Visionary stop his mad Time nonsense.
> 
> And then danger, as the young lovers are discovered.

I was in my lover’s arms, when it hit me. We had been kissing in earnest, but suddenly I pulled away. >>My father is an evil man<< I said, in an oddly deadened voice. >>This isn’t about Time, for him. It’s about power.<<

>>Yes<< nodded my lover. >>How long have you known?<<

I closed my eyes, and thought of how many breaths, how many minutes, how many hours. >>Since this morning.<<

The madman smiled. He liked it when I made an effort to reach into his madness. >>What will you do?<<

>>I don’t know. There has to be some way to... to oust him. But how?<<

>>You could kill him.<<

I shuddered, even as I saw the sense in what The Visionary said. >>Is there no other way? If we kill him, then... we become as bad as he is, don’t we?<<

>>You are still the best-placed person to do it, though. You have unprecedented access. He would never suspect...<<

I put my mouth over my lover’s mostly just to shut him up, kissing him urgently and hungrily, even as I thought through what I would have to do. Could I really do it? How? I knew where the guns were kept, but... surely it would be easier just to poison him or something? And yet that would be riskier, too. Higher chance of getting caught; less chance of success...

My lover stopped, and pulled away, leaving a tiny trail of kisses off my lips and down my chin. Reaching up, he gently brushed the scarred stump of his missing hand across my cheek, as if he had momentarily forgotten it was no longer whole. I had not forgotten; I knew it was my father who had done this to him. Moving my head gently to the side, I kissed it, and he smiled tenderly and moved it back down, across my shoulder.

>>There’s something I want to do with you<< he said at last, shifting his hips, though it was hard for him to move without catching the chain around his neck.

>>Yes, alright<< I said eagerly, anything to bring that radiant smile that looked almost like sanity.

>>It might hurt, but I think you’ll like it.<<

>>Will you like it?<<

>>Yes, yes. Very much.<<

>>Will it take very long<< I teased.

>>Trust me, even I won’t notice time, when this is happening.<<

My eyes widened, at the thought that there was something I could do, that could bring my lover back to sanity, no more of this time-nonsense. >>Yes, we must do it now.<<

>>I want to get inside the mouth between your legs<< he breathed into my ear, pushing between my thighs. It felt amazing, what he was doing, but the idea of this second mouth was so ridiculous I had to stifle the urge to roll my eyes. I wasn’t dispelling his madness, just replacing one delusion with another.

>>There is no mouth between my legs. There’s only places where my piss and shit come out.<<

But he laughed and moved on top of me, nudging my legs wider with his own. >>You’ve seen your own birth. Where did the baby come out?<<

I looked at him astonished, because although his hand was on my face, and the stump of his other arm on my shoulder, he pushed and suddenly got... some other _limb_ inside me? For a moment, it hurt. And suddenly all the other memories came rushing in. I had done this 30 times. 60 times. A hundred times. My lover on top of me, my lover beside me, my lover behind me, straining against me. The pleasure was exquisite, unbearable, my skin aflame, my flesh shuddering. His mouth on my breasts. Another mouth on my breasts, but this one was suckling. A baby. A tiny blond baby. I was on an island. I was walking on a beach with a small blond boy, pointing off into the distance.  >>Look, your father is over there, let’s see if we can catch up.<< So much laughter. So much love. So much... loss? The boy and his father were fighting over something, wrestling over some object I couldn’t see.

And then the visions cleared for a moment, as I found myself pulled, violently back into my own body by the force of a spasm going off between my legs. An orgasm. My first orgasm. And at the same time, every orgasm I had ever had, and would ever have, all going off at once. My body convulsed until I almost blacked out. For a moment, I lost consciousness, then suddenly understood. Time. I saw it all at once. The sequence of events. Hours. Months. Seasons. Years. I _felt_ time. Yes, I think it would drive me mad, if I had to feel that all the time.

Abruptly, I snapped back into consciousness, lying flat on my back on that hard metal table, with my lover sweating and straining, and finally falling back against me, showering my face with kisses.

>>You like it?<< he asked, grinning at me, his eyes bright.

>>I love it<< I gasped, as I felt my heart thudding, one hundred and twenty beats per minute, and added, softly. >>I love you.<<

A thousand conflicting emotions filled his face. Pride, embarrassment, joy, fear. >>It’s mad to fall in love with your own jailor<< he tutted. >>But I suppose I am mad.<<

>>I’m not your jailor. We are both prisoners.<<

>>We’re not prisoners when we’re together<< he breathed softly. >>When we are together, we are free. Free! Love sets us free.<<

 

I came back, every chance I could get. It was no longer enough, just kissing and holding one another. It wasn’t even the physical pleasure of taking him inside me; it was the rush of visions, sensations, mixed-up bits of memories and things-to-come, voices, emotions, that penetrated my mind, every time he entered me. But it took me several attempts to try to raise it with him.

>>What’s it like for you? I mean, you get the shuddery pleasure-burst, don’t you?<<

>>The orgasm<< he corrected, with a little laugh. >>Yes, I get that, too.<<

>>And the visions? Do you get that emotional rush?<<

>>Visions?<< he said cautiously. >>I get a deep sense of emotional peace, afterwards, that for a little while, all of the problems of consciousness... of being, of existence... they ebb away. But they always come back. Like tides.<<

>>Tides?<< I asked, perplexed. >>What are tides?<<

>>Every twelve hours or so, the waters... oh, never mind. What kind of visions do you get?<<

>>Just flashes... sights, sounds... well, every sense. Little bursts where it’s like... little bits of other people’s lives come to me with such vivid intensity, it’s like I’m there.<<

>>What do you see?<<

>>An island, mostly. A very lonely island, like two broken teeth sticking up out of this low, marshy sea. It’s beautiful, but kind of desolate. Though I’m not alone there. There’s...<< For some reason I was afraid to mention the baby. >>There’s a boy there, with me. A young boy. And sometimes you’re there. There’s a house. Two houses – one where we sleep, and one where you work. Some of it is underground. But I know it’s on the island. Or underneath. I just know.<<

>>The Island<< he kind of whimpered, and a pained look came over his face, like he was starting to give into the madness again. For a brief spell, after we did the thing with our bodies, he would be calm, almost sane, playful and affectionate, until, like he had said, the madness came rising back. >>The Island. To be free...<<

>>Underground, there’s a long, curved tunnel, lined with tubes, and down there, you always seem to be up ahead of me. Like... you’re always racing up ahead to get to the next door ahead of us... saying... saying you’ll catch the molecules first. ‘All the molecules’ you keep shouting back at me. ‘Every single one’...<<

>>In circles<< he finished, his voice almost a whisper. >>The Island<< he repeated, raising himself on one elbow and twisting away. >>We smash the cells together, with such a force... such a great force... into groundlessness, with full force! Until it looses the bonds, the junctions... it rips the cells apart. It rips holes in time itself.<<

>>That’s the other thing, my love<< I whispered to him, trying to pull his face back to mine with my fingers, but the chain wouldn’t let him come too close. >>In the visions, I can understand... I can _feel_ time. <<

>>Not visions<< he said. >>Not visions at all. Memories of the _past_. My past. Glimpses of your _future_. <<

I knew those words; I had heard them before. But after the visions, they had stopped being little nonsense phrases – to-come and gone-ness – and started being terms that meant something.

Somewhere outside the door, far too close, someone had started up a weird, eerie cry, a keening noise that didn’t even sound human. My lover twitched as if the sound bothered him. >>They have started torturing him<< he said. >>You should go.<<

>>But you don’t want to hear it, either...<<

>>I don’t want you to see me like this. Go!<<

I gathered up my things, re-dressed quickly, and picked up the discarded food bowls. But as I stepped out into the corridor, one of the guards, clearly out for a cigarette break, caught sight of me.

>>Halt! Who goes there? What are you doing down here?<< he called out, reaching almost instinctively for his pistol.

>>I’m the Professor’s daughter, and I’m on urgent business, bringing the prisoner his food.<<

Although that should have been the end of it, the soldier, a new man I didn’t recognise, stepped closer to me and took a sniff, casting his eye over my dishevelled hair. >>You stink like a fucking whorehouse. Just what have you been doing in there, with the Visionary?<<

I had to think on my feet, and fast, but at that moment, the Leader of Sedition cried out again, a strangled noise somewhere between pain and terror. Straightening myself up, I looked the soldier in the eye. >>You have your interrogation methods<< I snapped, in my father’s arrogant, demanding tone of voice. >>And I have mine. Now look sharp, and salute when you see an officer that outranks you.<<

The young soldier looked confused for a moment, but then clearly his military training kicked in, as he did indeed twitch to attention, and pulled a rather sloppy salute, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that I was really an officer, but all the same, he couldn’t afford to disobey. >>Yes, Marm.<<

>>And fetch the Visionary another drum of drinking water. I want him in decent shape for his interrogation tomo... his next interrogation.<<

>>Of course, Marm!<<

As he went off to fulfil my orders, I ran up the stairs, and headed straight for my bathroom. I didn’t want to wash the smell of my lover off my skin, but I had already slipped up badly once – nearly twice. First, getting caught at all. And second, it had so nearly slipped out. His interrogation _tomorrow_. No one in the town used words like ‘tomorrow’, or talked about the future or time at all. It was almost as if, since Time was gone, people had just stopped believing in it. So to use those words... that would reveal that I was as mad as my lover.

We had to get out! We had to get to the Island. To be free.


	5. Kapitel Fünf: Attack!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the seditionaries attack the Institute, the narrator is forced to choose between her father and the Visionary.

The seditionaries attacked when it next grew dark. I had been asleep in my room upstairs, but I woke with a start, breathing heavily, in a state of near-panic, nearly a full minute before the explosion rocked the building. Just lying there in the gloom, I tried to count my racing heartbeats, instinctively grasping that something had to be _wrong_ , that waking suddenly in the night was something that had never happened before. So when the explosion lit up my room as bright as day, and the whole building suddenly lurched and shook, it was almost as if I had been waiting for it. Pulling on my clothes, I ran to the window to see a huge cloud of smoke billowing from the front of the Institute. And when the smoke cleared, I could see that the huge iron gate that locked us away from the world simply wasn’t there any more, and that two – no three – figures were running up into the house.

>>My lover!<< was my first thought, and I almost ran to the stairs, but then reason stilled my movement. If it was the Seditionaries, the first place they would go would be to the cellars, to look for their leader. I tugged on my shoes and found a jacket with a hood to hide my face, then turned to the only weapon in my room – the Viking axe – stuffing it into the lining of my coat.

As I slipped into the corridor, trying to keep to the shadows, I heard gunshots from downstairs, in the direction of the guards’ dormitory. A return of fire from the other side of the house, and they fell silent. Cook’s and Housekeeper’s rooms were silent and dark – how could they sleep through this? For a moment, habit almost turned me towards my mother’s room, but I thought again of my lover. My mother would live and die, over and over again, but my lover? He had but one death, and I didn’t want it to be tonight! So I started silently down the stairs, carefully avoiding the squeaky steps that could report my presence.

Downstairs looked like a battlefield. The front hall was filled with debris from the explosion, broken glass and bits of twisted iron, and the insolent new guard lay slumped against the wall, his eyes glassy and staring, blood sloshing from a great wound that a shard of flying metal had torn through his neck. I forced myself to look at him, remembering the impertinent once-over his eyes had given me earlier that day? – week? The sluggish non-time of the house had been completely disrupted by the sudden event of the night. I nudged him gently with the toe of my boot, but he was already dead.

A noise startled me from downstairs, and I hurled myself back against the wall, hiding in the shadows. A gunshot, and then a second one. A voice cried out, and was cut short. My lover? My throat tightened with fear, as all was silent down below except for a strange scuffling noise. Then an eerie banging noise started up, and I felt my fear loosen. I would recognise that sound, even in my sleep. My lover thwacking away at his book, to let me know that he was alive, and probably hungry. I smiled to myself, and nearly flung myself across the hall, to flee down the stairs to join him, when I heard a noise in my father’s office. Not a loud noise, just something like a gurgling moan, but the wrong kind of noise to be coming from that room of orderly, scientific calm. I stopped myself from crossing the exposed floor, and edged along the wall, closer to the door.

The group must have split up, I realised, as I caught sight of the back of a young man’s head, a wild young man with long, curly dark hair and a barbarian’s clothes, stalking up and down by my father’s bookshelves. But where was my father? He must have heard that explosion. If he had run out into the hall, he would have been mown down like that insolent guard, but I hadn’t seen his body. I craned my neck, gripping my axe very tightly, and peered in as far as I dared. There was a body, tied to a chair, slumped over by the desk, a bag tied over its head, though it looked more like a sack of potatoes than a human being. For a minute, I tried to make sense of what I saw, then realised, as the fabric puckered and expanded over the potato-man’s mouth, that he was still alive.

For a moment, I genuinely prevaricated. He was still my father, after all. But hatred curdled in the pit of my stomach as I thought of the mangled lump of flesh where my lover’s hand should have been, the cigarette burns on his body, the scars that dotted his freckled limbs. For that, I would leave my father to the barbarian.

Slipping down the hall, I made my way to the back stairs, but I nearly tripped over a body as I reached the basement. One of the guards had clearly tried to ambush the seditionaries, and paid for it with his life. But I recognised his uniform – the Captain. Dropping to my knees, I dug on his belt, and located the set of master keys. It took only a moment to ascertain – yes, there was a single key with a strange, triangular shaft, like the lock of my lover’s collar – so I unclasped them and tucked them into my pocket.

I slid along the wall, looking for the others, but the blond boy had gone from the cell where he had been hung in chains. There was a smear of blood on the floor opposite, and a set of bloody footprints leading away to... oh god. They had gone into the Visionary’s cell.

I stood outside for what felt like an eternity, wishing I had never learned to understand time. Time was a torture, this _waiting_ , fists clenched, heart pounding, not knowing if I would ever see my beloved alive again. Minutes ticked by as I tried to calm my breaths, my ears straining for sounds. Every thwack of the hammer filled me with hope, knowing that those barbarians had not killed my lover yet. If I stayed very quiet, I could hear my lover talking to them, his voice low, almost whispered, sounding quite, quite mad, telling them about the reasonlessness. A great cry of pain! Oh no! But then another thwack. He was still alive. But what were they doing to him? Or was he just playing with them?

Now he was talking about the Island, giving directions even! I had never been certain that the Island was even a real place. And yet my lover was telling them to head down the river by boat, but to leave everything behind when they reached the coast. To swim. To cut loose and swim, no possessions and especially no weapons.

The three of them were talking among themselves when they finally emerged, two men and a woman, arguing quietly about this Island. One of the men was limping slightly, dripping blood from a hastily bandaged arm. I crouched down, and scrunched up tight, pushed myself almost into the wall, hidden in the darkness of the shadows, and they walked straight past me, towards the main stairs. The blond one, he looked so familiar I felt as though I could reach out and tap him on the shoulder, and he would turn around and smile at me in recognition and joy, but it took every ounce of self-control not to attract his attention. But he passed, and was gone, leaving a strange aching in my heart.

I waited, as they went up the stairs, though every nerve in my body told me to run, to throw myself inside my lover’s cell and lock the door behind me. And yet, I knew, I had to remain silent, had to glide like a ghost and make no sign, so as not to draw attention to myself. My only survival lay in not being discovered. I counted to one hundred, then counted again, but they did not come back down. So finally, I dared to creep from the shadows and slipped inside the old operating theatre.

>>Reasonlessness<< my lover was muttering to himself, as he thwacked away at his Bible. His eyes were quite wild, and I was afraid he was completely gone, as he rambled. >>To lose oneself... to loose oneself. Empty out one’s mind.. to be free. Free!<< But he looked up at my approach, and shook his hammer-fist at me. >>You have to go now. Quickly.<<

>>I’ve got the keys<< I told him. >>We can both go.<<

For a moment, he just looked at me, disbelieving, even as I climbed up onto the table and tugged at the chain, trying to get some slack for him. Parting the long hair at the back of his neck, I tugged at the collar to get at the lock, then slid the key home. It fit perfectly, though it creaked as it turned, so stiff I was afraid the key would break in the lock, but after a brief wrestle, it sprung open. Teasing the bits of metal apart, I lifted it clear of his head, then laid it on the table beside him, as he stared at me, astonished.

>>You’re free, my love. Free<< I told him, but he shook his head morosely, his eyes very afraid.

>>You have to go<< he insisted, his voice racked with fear. >>To the Island. You have to get there before they do. You cannot let it fall into their hands.<<

>>Come with me<< I begged, tugging at his sleeve as if I could physically force him off the table, but now he was released, he seemed curiously unwilling to leave its safety.

>>I can’t.<<

>>Why not?<<

>>My love, I am already there.<<

>>What?<< I just looked at him blankly.

>>The same person, existing in two streams of time, in parallel... that is safe.<< He gestured with his hand and the hammer, indicating two parallel lines. >>But if they touch?<< He slammed his hammer into his good hand and let out a fearsome cry. >>Boom!<<

>>I don’t understand<< I protested, pulling his hand away from the hammer, though I could see he was now bleeding.

>>Go to the Island. Travel only by night. You will be safe, in this night. It is Non-Time. Take nothing with you. Nothing metal – no weapons, no coins – you will not need money. And take off your clothes, when you swim to the Island. Do not walk. Only swim, when the tide is in.<< To my blank look, he patiently explained. >>Water floods in from the sea twice a day, between the Island and the mainland. It will be deep enough to swim. And you must swim, not walk, not touch the ground. Do you understand? It happened just after high tide, just before 10 o’clock. So swim. And take nothing from this Time-stream. Nothing at all. Then you will get through.<<

>>Get through where?<<

>>To the Island. You have seen it in your visions. Yes? You know what I am talking about. You will find me, on the Island. You must convince the other me to stop the Incident from ever happening, the first time. I will tell you what to say, what to do. To have Time again. All the time in the world. But you must get to the Island first, before they do. Do you understand?<< His voice was so urgent it scared me, but for once his eyes did not look mad. He looked almost completely sane.

>>I don’t understand. But if you tell me what to do, I will do it.<<

>>Good.<< Leaning forward, he moved his mouth to my ear, and whispered his message to me. He told me again and again, and made me repeat it, three times, to make sure I had it. >>Do not write it down. Take nothing from this time-stream. You have to memorise it. Tell me that, when you see me again – see me _before_. Then I will understand, and I will do as you ask. <<

>>Alright.<< I leaned forward and kissed him, and he put his arms around me, and held me for what felt like forever. Then he pulled away. But instead of letting me go, he lowered his head to my stomach, and spoke gently to the soft curve that had recently started to grow there.

>>I love you. I want you to know that, though I know _you_ will not understand. I’m doing this for you, as much as for her. << Then he snapped his head away, and I could see the wildness returning to his eyes. >>Now go. _Now_. <<

For a moment, I just looked at him, wondering how I could ever find the strength to leave him. But abruptly, upstairs, there was the sharp retort of a gun. My eyes widened as I gaped at my lover. My father. The Professor. I knew without a doubt that the Seditionaries had killed him. A sudden surge of white-hot anger spurred me to action, as I climbed down from the table, and fled the room. I could hear footsteps upstairs, running from my father’s office towards the front stairs, so I headed for the back. The house was deserted as I caught a glimpse of curly blond hair bobbing down the stairs to the outside. Yet even as I glanced into my father’s office, my mind refused to recognise what I was seeing. The potato-sack man was slumped in a chair, cascades of red-black blood pouring from a gaping hole in the lump of sodden canvas where his head used to be. As I could hear the Seditionaries regrouping and shouting at one another on the front stairs, I ran out the back, heading down towards the river.


	6. Kapitel Sechs: The Island

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The narrator travels to the Island. But what she finds there, could stop time... or could destroy the world.

I stole a motorboat and went down the river in the dark. It wasn’t very far, but in the lower reaches of the river, the water seemed to be flowing backwards, up the channel, which made the going a bit rough. But this was as my lover had said, this was the tide; the water of the sea that was supposed to rush in and out, twice a day. The moon hung overhead, bright enough to see by, and I kept expecting it to sink, and for dawn to break, but the night remained close all around.

As my little motorboat fought the incoming water, it finally putted through, into an estuary, and then out into a great expanse of water, glistening and shiny silver-black in the moonlight. I ditched the boat, pulling it up onto a sand dune, then stood and stared out to sea. Yes, there was an island out there, dark against the moonlit sea, a low hump against the water with two sharp, jagged peaks on it, just as I had remembered it, like a pair of broken teeth. A yellow light glistened in the night, reflected back as a wavy, wiggly twin in the water. So someone was at home.

Shivering slightly, I started to pull my clothes off, but when I reached into the pocket of my jacket, my hand touched the axe. Oh no. Surely I didn’t have to rid myself of that? It was the only thing I had left of who my father was... _before_. But my lover had been quite clear: take nothing with you. Especially not weapons. Closing my eyes, I made a wish. Then I stepped back, and with a mighty effort, hurled the axe up into the air with all my might. For an almost impossibly long moment, I watched its arc, its blade glinting in the moonlight as it whirled, before it finally splashed down into the sea. Then I stripped off the rest of my clothes, even my boots, waded out into the icy water, and swam for the island.

The tide seemed to be turning, the water slowly going out again and carrying me with it, so it didn’t take very long to swim. Day was finally breaking as I reached the shore, and hauled myself up onto a small wooden jetty. For a moment, I just lay there, panting, in the sun, trying to warm up, but the air now seemed colder than the water. The two broken teeth had resolved themselves into a small clutch of high-gabled houses and barns, huddled together against the wind. A helpful signpost pointed the way, declaring one to be >>Dormitory<< and the other to be >>Laboratory<< so I picked the left-hand path and made my way up to the Laboratory.

>>Particle Accelerator Control Office: No Admittance Without Proper Clearance<< declared the sign on the door, but there was a keypad to control entry, and my lover had told me the code. I punched it in, shivering, and the door popped open. Mercifully, it was warmer inside, as I made my way through the radiation checkpoint and past the decontamination room to the control centre.

And there, at a huge control desk, bristling with computer displays and read-outs and obscure knobs and dials and keyboards full of arcane mathematical symbols sat... my lover? I hardly recognised him. He was still slender, but with his gaunt face filled out a little, rather than skin and bone, and with his long hair carefully styled and brushed out of his face, he looked almost unbearably handsome. He sipped at his morning coffee and smoked a cigarette I was almost certain must have been against the rules, flipping casually through a computer print-out filled with arcane figures, as if reading a morning newspaper.

>>Blixa<< I called out, and he jumped.

>>No one’s called me that in _years_ << he protested, as he swivelled in his chair, then started as he saw me standing, dripping on the carpet. Almost immediately, his eyes went to my bare breasts, and he smiled reflexively, clearly enjoying what he was seeing, though he abruptly managed to stop himself, and wrenched his eyes back to my face. >>How did you get in here? This is a top secret facility!<<

>>You gave me the code, Blixa.<< I tried to explain.

>>What? I did nothing of the sort. And stop calling me that. It’s Herr Doktor Emmerich to you<< he protested, tapping a name-badge that was pinned to his white lab coat.

>>Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. Just do as I say. There is no time. Do you understand me? We are about to run out of time.<<

He merely laughed, folding his arms across his chest, though I marvelled to see his left hand whole, fidgeting up to scratch reflexively at a small mole on the right side of his chin. >>We are over two million, five hundred thousand seconds into a high-energy particle physics experiment which is due to run for the next five months. One might say we have all the time in the world. Honestly, who are you, what are you doing here? Is this a joke? Are you some kind of strip-o-gram or something? Did Dr Chudy put you up to this?<<

I looked around me, noticed a sheaf of paper hung up, that appeared to show days of a month, numbered one to thirty, marked off in little squares, some of which had been crossed off. It was exactly as my lover had described. People on the outside marked the passage of time on these things. It seemed miraculous. My eyes spun about looking for the other thing he had described, a large circular disc hung on the wall, with numbers arranged around the dial and arms that swept round it to count the minutes and hours. The shorter arm was getting perilously close to the 10, which was the timepoint my lover had warned me about.

>>Look, we haven’t got much time. In fifteen minutes, the Professor will dial into your computer control system with a modem, and program in a new set of trajectory coordinates which will introduce an instability into the proton flow.<< I hoped to god those were the right words, but Herr Doktor Emmerich’s eyes widened. >>He is going to set off the collisions early, before the containment field has reached full strength...<<

>>But that would be madness!<< he exclaimed, gesturing towards a large round monitor that looked a bit like an oscilloscope, displaying wavering lines in a glowing green. >>We discussed this, in depth, at the Professor’s lectures, back during my Post-Doctoral studies. The flow must be perfectly calibrated. To introduce instabilities, why that could accidentally generate a Singularity! Such an event... such a mathematically impossible non-event... that could form tiny, subatomic-sized black holes. One cannot allow a naked singularity to just... wander about. Such a mathematical paradox could rip holes in the fabric of Time itself, create loops, and other anomalies. It took all of my work, my visionary mathematics, to develop the electromagnetic fold-back technique, to slowly and steadily build a strong enough containment field to shield and hold a singularity for study, but it takes _months_. The Professor would never... <<

>>The Professor’s wife is dying<< I explained, sadly.

>>She’s not dying, she’s just pregnant<< he argued stubbornly. >>The Professor is on paternity leave. That’s why I’m here, covering his shifts. His wife is expecting their first child, and....<< At just that moment, a phone started to ring on the desk console. But as his eyes moved towards it, I realised it wasn’t a normal phone, for humans. The handset was cradled in a strange rubber contraption, which was wired into the guts of the computer. And abruptly, the machine clicked, and the computer answered. A little box suddenly lit up brightly on the side of the control desk, and lines of text started to cascade across the computer monitor, in a way that seemed to alarm Herr Doktor Emmerich. >>No! It can’t be<< he said suddenly, and leapt to his feet. As the green waves of the oscilloscope monitor started to twist and bend and speed up, he seized the phone’s handset and pulled it, manually, out of the rubber socket. >>Oh no<< he yelped, dropping the receiver, then bent down to disconnect the wire from the base of the phone.

But the main computer monitor had lit up, and new lines of code were scrolling across it faster than a person could type. >>That’s his program<< I gasped. >>He has launched his attack – but you told me what to do. You taught this to me, made me repeat it three times to make sure I had got it right. Command line D, colon, backslash, enter. Update field Delta of T, set value equals open parentheses Sigma divided by the square root of Epsilon star Planck Constant...<<

>>That’s my research<< he protested. >>How can you know my research?<<

>>Do it<< I urged, and spilled out the rest of the sequence, as I realised that the string of numbers and commands was actually a digitised equation. For a moment, he hesitated, but as the calm green lines on the oscillating monitor started to move from their fast flickering sine waves, to jagged, random, pulsing bursts of noise, he sat, and started to type the stream of numbers and letters and Greek symbols into the machine, using the special keyboard. A strange bell, like an alarm started to go off, deep in the bowels of the building, and he swore, and started to type faster. Finally, it was done, and he hit submit. For a few horrible moments, we held our breaths, as my stomach lurched, with a weird sensation like I was being beaten up from the inside, but the bell stopped, and the wavering green lines on the computer monitor went back to normal.

My stomach, however, didn’t calm down, as I realised with a shock... there was something in there. I recalled how my lover had bent down and kissed my belly, and understood: he had known before I had.

>>Who _are_ you? << demanded this scientist, who somehow both was, and was not my lover.

>>I’m your lover<< I confessed, and as I folded my hands around my belly, I couldn’t help but smile. >>And the mother of your child.<<

That alarmed him, as he looked me up and down, his eyes coming to rest on my protruding stomach. >>Look, sure. You’re very beautiful, and you are naked in my lab. But if you are pregnant, I have never met you before in my life, so you cannot pin that one on me. I have never even seen you before.<<

>>No<< I replied with a smirk and a faint giggle, finally understanding how slippery and impossible these words were, _before_ and _after_ , in our predicament. >>You have never seen me before, no. But you will see a lot of me in the _to-come_. <<

As he stared at me, he raised his left hand and started to scratch again at that mole on his chin. It was such a familiar gesture, and yet so alien, to see his hand whole, and not the expected hammer. >>The future? You know that’s... well, if not technically impossible, it’s still statistically highly unlikely. The mathematical improbability would be... astronomical!<<

>>How else would I know your research, Blixa? And how else would I know your teenage nickname?<<

>>To be fair, no one could even _understand_ what you just told me to do, unless I had personally explained it to them... and you’re clearly not one of my students. I would have remembered a stunner like you. << He was clearly struggling with this, but his eyes kept lingering on certain parts of my anatomy, until he ventured a smile. >>Alright. Can I just say that I have good taste, in the future?<< he quipped, and I laughed at the idea that he could be flirting, so close to the world nearly ending, but my breath was cut off by an involuntary shudder.

The room seemed to glisten, to shudder and shine like the reflection of the moon and the light, the previous night. And I knew, as I started to catch glimpses of tiny visions, that something was very, very wrong. >>Oh no<< I said, as almost invisible moving pinholes of nothing seemed to drift up from the floor and move about the room, disrupting the light and the optics with their shimmering, oil-slick coloured _wrong_ ness. >>This is bad.<<

>>Sorry! Ugh, don’t be such a dork, Christian. Look, my apologies. A beautiful, naked woman stumbles into my laboratory – the first woman I’ve even seen in about five weeks – and tells me she’s my lover from the Future. I suppose I better start trying to make a better impression if we’re going to...<< Again, his eyes fell on my belly with an odd expression. >>A kid, huh? A beautiful girl like you, and a nerd like me?<<

But I shook my head as I backed slowly away from the place on the floor where the... pinhole bursts of wrongness seemed to emanating up from. As I watched, horrified, one drifted over to the computer, and the metal of its structure seemed to bend and warp. Another drifted up towards the round face with all the numbers on it – the _clock_ , he had called it – and abruptly the restless little hand started ticking backwards, before jumping forward half a minute, then started ticking backwards again.

>>Something’s wrong here<< I insisted, and Herr Doktor Emmerich slowly turned around to see that the lines of the oscilloscope, which should have been slowly rolling sine waves, had rolled up into a perfect circle, which was bubbling and replicating until the monitor looked like Swiss cheese.

>>Oh shit<< he said, and pushed his chair back to the keyboard, typing commands into it rapidly, trying to regain control over the machine. >>What the... I’ve been locked out.<<

>>Where’s the particle-accelerator’s collider?<< I demanded.

>>Beneath our feet. It seemed safest to have it about a mile out to sea, in case anything went wrong. Don’t worry, there’s six solid foot of lead between us and it, there’s no radiation, nothing can get through...<< But as he spoke, he kept shimmering back and forth. The sleek young doctor seemed to peel away, for a moment, revealing a gaunt, haggard madman with a hammer for a fist, then he shimmered back, before revealing an old man, with greying hair and a strange, glittery suit. Time seemed to... warp, and the handsome but nerdy Herr Doktor was back, before giving way to an angry young man with a patchily shaved head, and one eye ringed with black stage make-up.

>>Something is really wrong here<< I stuttered, feeling my newly found sense of Time tingling and twinging and just... no. This was almost painful, as I could feel a piercing ache in the regions of my brain where I had learned to recognise Time. The wrongness of everything around me was like a physical sense of sharp, tingling electricity running up and down my skin. >>You’re not supposed to be here!<<

>>What do you mean, I’m not supposed to be here?<< he retorted, sounding almost offended. >>I’m the most brilliant young physicist in all of West Germany. I have _earned_ this position at the research facility. Been working towards it all my life. I aced the Arbitur a year early, and breezed through an undergraduate degree in eighteen months. I wrote my first PhD at age 22, and my second at 23. My theoretical research on high-energy particle physics is considered visionary. _Visionary_. <<

>>No.<< I shook my head as my vision seemed to crowd with half a dozen Blixas in various states of various lives. >>You are not supposed to be here. This is not who you were meant to be. You never took the Arbitur. You were expelled from Gymnasium at age 17. You started an experimental punk band with a high school friend, that ended up changing the history of music forever...<<

>>Experimental punk band?<< scoffed Herr Doktor Emmerich. >>That was some nonsense that Dr Chudy and I used to muck about with when we were just kids, still at school. I haven’t touched a guitar in... years...<< But as he spoke, a siren started to go off downstairs, which made us both jump with its aggressive, snarling tone, though it seemed to be drifting in and out of phase with itself, in some curious sonic Doppler Effect. >>Shit! The radiation alarm!<<

>>If that’s the alarm...<< I barely dared to venture as he turned back to face the stricken computer again. >>Then what was that ringing sound, earlier?<<

>>Ringing sound?<< he asked as he pounded at the useless keyboard.

>>Is there another phone in the building? Another modem line...<<

>>There’s an old modem for exporting backups that goes... straight into the mainframe downstairs.<< As he said it, his eyes grew huge, and we both ran towards the stairs. As he wrenched open the heavy lead-lined door, we looked down the stairs, which seemed to be buckling and warping before us like some funfair ride. >>Oh my god, a singularity has already formed. As we’ve been sitting chatting, it’s been _feeding_ on the redirected particle beam that is supposed to contain it. And in this short time, it’s become large enough to warp the fabric of local spacetime. No! Don’t look at it. << Thrusting his hand before my face, he turned his own eyes away. >>Never look into a naked singularity. It would snap your mind like a twig, to witness such a thing.<<

>>Is that how you went mad?<< I whispered. >>Thrown into insubstantiality with full force...<<

But the Scientist, his mind still whole, was looking about wildly. >>I’ve got to do something! If I can program the new code directly into the mainframe... well, it’s probably too late to stop the Singularity, but at least I can stabilise it, stop it from growing any further... But inside its event horizon, time will just spin round and round in a loop, like a mouse on a Mobius Strip. My god, that’s where you came from, isn’t it? You must have swum in on a temporal distortion wave, rippling back and forwards through time.<<

>>Something like that. But is it me, or is it... growing?<< The iridescent oil-slick visual distortions seemed to be spreading out all across the room like a poisonous miasma.

>>Like I said, it’s feeding on the particle beam. I never could model the maths perfectly for this scenario. It’s totally unpredictable, how fast this thing can grow. Good god, if it reaches the mainland of Germany, there’s a whole town of 10,000 people out there, not to mention the university...<<

>>The Institute<< I sighed. >>He wants it to reach the Institute. He wants to stop time, because his wife is dying.<<

>>If I don’t stop this, thousands could die...<< As he started down the perilously warping and wavering stairs, I moved to follow him, but he put his hand protectively across my belly. >>No. You mustn’t come with me. We have no idea what the effects of such temporal distortions might be on a human body... let alone on a foetus. Please, stay back.<<

>>I...<< I started to protest, but he cut me off by thrusting his hand across my mouth. This scientist was even ruder and more arrogant than the madman I had fallen in love with.

>>No! No arguing. I’m a doctor. Twice over. Do what I say.<< But as he reached the second step, he abruptly stopped and turned back. >>You are my wife in the future, yes?<<

>>Well, we are lovers...<< I tried to explain.

>>May I kiss you? If I die down there, I want to at least have kissed a beautiful woman recently.<<

>>Of course.<< He put his hands into the back of my hair, pulled my face towards his, and gave me a kiss that could have stopped time.

>>Now get back behind the lead-lined door!<< he shouted as he trudged up the stairs down to the cellars. >>That alarm only goes off if radiation reaches an unsafe level. So if I’m not back within ten minutes... There’s a self-destruct button in the red-glass box on the wall of the lab. The password is Anna – A-N-N-A. Follow the instructions, set it, and get the hell out of here, OK?<< And with that, he disappeared round a corner into a mathematically impossible spatial distortion.

None of the clocks in the control centre were working. One was just going round and round in a loop, another was going backwards, and the third, a digital clock on the computer screen, was just flicking through numbers at random. I had to sit down and count my heartbeat to work out the time, though it was going so fast I had to count every second beat. A minute went by, then two, with no change. The building seemed to warp around me in geometrically impossible shapes, until I could see inside my own body, and watch my baby – our son – shifting around trying to get comfortable. Tiny showers of black holes the size of pinheads bubbled up through the floor and exploded upon colliding with each other, winking out of existence into anti-matter. Five minutes, and the floor stopped bucking about like an untamed horse. Six minutes and the oscilloscope’s Swiss cheese folded in on itself to become a perfect Fibonacci spiral. Seven minutes, and the first clock shattered, its battery burned out. Eight minutes, and the stream of tiny pinhead black holes finally gave out, as the last one collided with the main computer monitor, cracking the glass and leaving nothing but a fizzing jagged streak down the centre of a dark screen. Nine minutes, and the backwards clock settled down into a regular loop, the second hand just sweeping round and round without disturbing either of the other hands. But just as I was getting up, to walk over to that sinister looking red glass box on the wall, there was a creak on the stairs and then a series of impatient bangs at the lead-lined door.

>>Bloody thing is too heavy for me to lift... help me, will you?<<

As I hauled it open, an old man stumbled through into the room, and collapsed. I ran to him, and cradled his silvery head in my lap, though those intense, piercing blue eyes were still the same, just completely mad and wild.

>>I’ve seen things a man should not see...<< he muttered, half to me and half to his own madness, and as I watched, he seemed to age before my eyes, both young and old and everything inbetween running backwards and forwards like that crazy clock, his cheekbones protruding then sinking, his jowls widening, the dark circles beneath his eyes expanding to huge bags as his beautiful light-brown hair became shot with silver, then turned completely white. >>Emptying itself... discarding itself... Throws its being into unsubstantial... into groundlessness... reasonlessness... with full force. With full force! Into un-existence.<< I felt my eyes filling with water, thinking how I had watched this man lose his mind, gain it again, only to lose it and plummet into madness, but abruptly he opened his eyes and focused them fully on me. >>It’s safe now. The disruption won’t spread any further than the Island. Though... I don’t think anyone’s coming to or leaving this island for a very long... time? Ha! There is no more time in here.<<

>>No<< I insisted, stroking his white hair. >>There is all the time in the world. You promised me.<<

He twisted his sunken lips into a smile. >>Damn, I must really have loved you...<< he started to say, but abruptly corrected himself, struggling for the grammatical tense in ungainly German. >>Will really have loved you? Has it happened yet, or is it still yet to come? Must... will... really... have... loved...<<

>>Yes<< I said, and with that, the light went out of his eyes, and he was gone.

 

The temporal distortions didn’t entirely stop, once he was dead. His body continued to waste away, even as I held him, crumbling to dust in my hands, until there was nothing left of him but a fine mist of sand. I cried until I didn’t think I could cry any more, just trying to grab hold of handfuls of dust. I wanted to shout; I wanted to scream and cry and pound my fists uselessly against the solid lead floor. But he was gone.

 

The tapping sound startled me. I had thought I was alone with my grief, losing mother, father, and lover all in one day. But the rhythm... the insistent tap-tap-tap-TAP, there was something so familiar about it. Climbing to my feet, I made my way up into the house, yet as I crossed in front of one of the windows, I was surprised to see something moving out there, just out of the corner of my eye. Two figures crossing the stark landscape of the windswept beach, a small boy with curly blond hair, and an old man with long, silver hair.

Tap-tap-tap-TAP went the sound again, as I wrenched my eyes away from the shimmering window, and walked to the decontamination room, which had triggered when the alarm went off. Inside the frosted glass, I could see a hunched figure demanding to be let in, rapping away insistently at the door with a left arm surmounted by a large, square hammer.

Gasping, I punched the all-clear button on the panel, and waited, feeling the absence of time almost painfully as I mentally counted down what I knew should be thirty seconds of depressurisation. But I grabbed at the handle of the door and hauled it open to reveal the tall, thin, impossibly gaunt figure of my mad lover leaning against the door frame, still wrapped in his black rubber mac, extending towards me the Viking axe that I had thrown into the sea.

>>My axe, my angst<< he said, with a mad but purposeful tilt to his eyebrows. >>Our son found this on the beach. You shouldn’t let him play with such dangerous things.<<

I just stared at him, barely daring to believe it, as I stuttered. >>But you’re dead. I watched you die in my arms.<<

He grinned his lopsided madman smile. >>And in this world, you’ve never been born.<<


End file.
